The Dubious Spectacle: Extremities of Theater, 1976-2000Spanning a quarter of a century, the essays in this book rehearse, in the movement of memory and cross-reflection, an extensive career in theater. The work of Herbert Blau-his directing, writing, and criticism-has been a determining force during this period as theater encounters theory. Blau's struggle to bring a critical intelligence to the American stage goes back half a century, to the quiescent postwar years (which he has eloquently described in The Impossible Theater: A Manifesto). His innovations in performance began with early productions of now-canonical plays that were hardly known at that time (works by Brecht, Beckett, Genet, Pinter, Duerrenmatt, and others). His experience is as distinctive as his versatile habits of mind and conceptual urgency of style. If the impossible takes a little time (as the title of one essay states), Blau's struggle now continues in a theoretical vein. Performance-and his own compelling writing- has moved across other genres and disciplines into fashion, politics, sexuality, and theory. His diversity of thought is demonstrated here in commentaries about the newer modes of performance (including conceptual and body art), various American playwrights, Renaissance drama, new music and theater, voice, the senses and the baroque, and the photographic image. As the essays reflect upon each other, a kind of cultural history, with inflections of autobiography, develops-which is what readers of Blau's previous books have come to expect. |
From inside the book
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... production ? or , in the ether of ideology , merely another ap- pearance ? As I have asked in other books , how seriously are we to take the persistent themes of the canonical drama , that all the world's a stage or that life is a dream ...
... production . By the time , a few years later , I did a somewhat revisionist staging of Galileo , I had already , drawn to Beckett astride of a grave , been equivocating about Brecht and his cri- tique of dramatic form that became second ...
... production that was a great success ) edified the incapacities of our liberal audience . " If the audience is not altogether an absence , it is by no means a reliable presence , " I wrote in the opening paragraph of xviii Introduction.
... productions of utterly unknown or relatively unknown , now canonical European dramatists , survival was next to impossible without the production of Broadway plays . It was these that paid the bills for our more controversial repertoire ...
... production , Danton's Death . After an early dinner , in which he was tactful with advice about some of the actors we had inherited and the hazards of New York , Harold walked me back to the theater , the stage door closing him out as I ...
Contents
Theater at the End of the Real | 9 |
2 The Impossible Takes a Little Time | 26 |
3 Spacing Out in the American Theater | 45 |
Rehearsing the Resistance | 61 |
5 A Dove in My Chimney | 70 |
An Analytic Scenario | 78 |
The Grail of the Voice | 126 |
Chills and Fever Mourning and the Vanities of the Sublime | 140 |
13 Readymade Desire | 207 |
From Tango Palace to Mud | 214 |
The Group Idea and Its Legacy | 223 |
New Music and Theater | 238 |
17 FlatOut Vision | 254 |
Sovereign Pleasure and the Baroque Subject in the Tragicomedies of John Fletcher | 273 |
Revising the Abyss | 289 |
The Insane Root | 315 |
9 The Dubious Spectacle of Collective Identity | 145 |
Subtext of a Syllabus for the Arts in America | 165 |
Educating the American Theater | 189 |
12 The Pipe Dreams of ONeill in the Age of Deconstruction | 197 |
Notes | 329 |
343 | |
345 | |